Spirits and Fiends
"I was the first to run in after the beast had fallen, acid spurting from a hundred wounds. The air was thick with the sound of screaming, with shrieks of agony so intense it didn't sound human anymore. I ran to the first cluster of men I could see, bandages out and ready. But these soldiers were dead, flesh melted down to puddles around blackened skeletons. The next group I checked were worse, nothing left but splinters of bone and scraps of skin. The screaming surrounded me, and I cast a spell to see the truth. The soldiers were dead, the monster was dead. But across the battlefield, twisted apparitions slumped and stalked and slithered, shouting the agony that was their essence with an urgent, newborn's need to make the world as filled with pain as they were. It was the first time I had seen a fiend." '- Diary of Barak Amedor, cleric of Aegis' Many words exist in the Lyric Empire for the supernatural creatures that exist wherever there are sentient creatures to create them. The 'evil' ones are known as devils, demons, oni, hellions. Collectively scholars call them 'fiends'. The 'good' creatures are called angels, celestials, archons, seraphs. Scholars call these 'spirits'. Creation Although fiends and spirits initially seem very different, the creation process is almost identical. The difference between them is largely academic, as the distinguishing feature of these creatures is that they are as varied as their creators. As almost everything about them is the same, academics tend to use the word 'spirits' to cover both types of creature, only getting more specific if necessary. Simply put, a fiend or a spirit is a manifestation of extreme emotion given a voice and form. In a world with no sentient creatures, there would be no fiends or spirits - animals can feel emotions such as pain, but it is never strong enough to form a fiend. Most bursts of strong emotion create a short lived, weak creature - a mewling kitten that will last only a matter of hours before fading back into the same stuff it is made from. A spirit or fiend such as this will not have anything more than a rudimentary consciousness - it is a baby for its brief span of existence. However, if the emotion is powerful enough, widespread enough or long lived enough, the essence coalesces and the 'spirit' becomes actualised. It begins to understand what it is, and is filled with an urgent need to survive. Lifecycle Spirits and fiends feed and grow strong on the same emotion that created them. For some spirits, this isn't a problem - a fiend of lust which grows inside a brothel does not need to hunt for sustenance. The same is true for the spirit of justice in the court house. However, if the brothel goes out of business or the judge becomes corrupt, the creatures will need to either find another source of the emotion, or find a way to create it in the world. With a few exceptions, most spirits and fiends are closely linked to their place of creation, especially if they were formed by multiple instances of the same emotion tied to one place - like the aforementioned lust fiend. This means it is difficult for them to say, move to another brothel after theirs has closed down. Even if they did, the emotions they feed on are finite and another lust fiend could already be in residence - and a fiend or spirit meeting another of their kind will try to subsume it, and gain a nice emotional boost from doing so. With relocation under their own power out of the picture for most fiends and spirits, they are left with few options. The most common result is that they wither away, cut off from their emotional food source, until they wink back out of existence. If a creature is not particularly strong it will not have a particularly strong sense of self, meaning this is the most likely end for it. If the spirit is more powerful however, it could attempt either to manipulate the world so as to produce its food source again, or it can seek to make a bargain with a mortal. Spirits and fiends can never influence the world directly. One that is weak or newly formed can do nothing except cry and hope to be fed by chance. An older and more powerful spirit however can begin to communicate with the creatures who created it, as it begins to form a more complex intelligence and personality. The easiest ways to do this are through dreams, mental whispers and gentle nudges. More powerful spirits may try to possess, control or alter the memories of their mortals in order to create the emotions they need. Obviously these more overt methods have a high risk of alerting the local church or adventurers guild - most clerics have at least some experience of expelling and destroying spirits. Becoming a Patron "The guard's axe blade nicked Tovak's neck as she stood trembling before the gibbet and she swallowed a cry. Her mother and her mother's girlfriend had gone before her - they swung almost delicately in the stiff breeze, but their faces were beginning to bloat already. The priest's sermon droned in her ears as she looked into the eyes of the crowd, her people, and saw nothing but apathy. Her heart burned with the indignity of it, with the injustice of a god who would let her parents die but spare these lamb-eyed cowards who knew her family was innocent but who were too afraid or too stupid to help them. A dove fluttered from the cave mouth and landed on her step-mother's shoulder, on the embroidered sleeve which Tovak herself had sewn. It cocked its head at her, and she saw that its eyes were white fire. It spoke in her head with a voice of searing flame: 'How can you let this happen? How can you do nothing?' She flinched and her eyes filled with tears. What can I do? I'm just a child. 'Let me help you. Let us find justice'. Yes. Yes of course. Tovak's world became white fire, and she knew she would never be powerless again." '- Spirit of Justice, a novel found in the home of a disgraced dwarf' Some spirits are determined to live, but they are either not powerful enough to directly cause the emotions they need, or they want a more subtle and more permanent home. These spirits appear to mortals and offer them deals - the most common of these is that the spirit will give the person power, so long as the person then creates more of the emotion that the spirit feeds upon. Mortals who take them up on this offer are known as spirit or fiend-pact warlocks. Unlike some other warlock pacts, a pact with a spirit tends to be mutually beneficial. Many pacts are made with the mortal knowing exactly what they are letting themselves in for, and so partnerships can quite happily last for decades. The mortal gets magical powers and arcane knowledge, and the spirit gets a reliable food source and a much stronger link to the world. A warlock pact makes the spirit much less likely to fade back into the ether, and a warlock has a strong incentive to keep the spirit fed and happy. Which is not to say that all such partnerships are so happy. Although spirits and fiends are created from mortal emotion, they are themselves incredibly alien. Their wants and desires may be completely different from what any mortal would want - and they are absolutely not above lying about their desires in order to complete a pact. There is also a more insidious risk which is little understood - the longer a warlock is bound to a spirit, the more their personality seems to reflect that of their patron. Finally, if a spirit or fiend becomes a patron to one warlock, and that warlock feeds them enough of the emotions they need, they can then take on further warlocks and become even stronger. Such spirits are rare, but not unheard of. Sub-types "One of the most specialised and unusual spirits I ever encountered lived on a perpetually frozen lake in a village east of Ryk. At first I couldn't work it out - in some aspects it resembled a pain demon, but there was joy in there as well. After hours of fruitless riddle conversation with it, I saw a man slip on the ice and fall heavily, much to the amusement of his children. I was amazed when the little spirit also doubled up with laughter, glowing as it fed. Who could have predicted a spirit of schadenfreude?" '- Elder Osso's Spirit and Fiend Compendium' Firstly, anyone who claims they can recognise and categorise any spirit or fiend is a liar. Efforts have been made ever since the existence of such creatures was verified, shortly after the rise of the First Mage, but spirits actively defy categorisation. Magical scholars who have chronicled every elemental, every giant, every undead monstrosity, come to spirits and been forced to admit defeat. As Elder Osso, one of Kingspire's most celebrated academics, stated in the opening to his compendium - 'One might as well try to name every grain of pollen in spring.' Although identifying every subtype of spirit is demonstrably impossible, spirit scholars and trained clerics can recognise aspects and elements of emotions which are common across all civilised peoples. Such experts look at the location of the spirit, the colour palette and the tone of their speech - an anger fiend will sound angry, a justice spirit will not be timid. Those with true sight can also study the form of the spirit - certain motifs are more common to certain spirits. But none of this is foolproof. The easiest way to describe the complexity of this task is to look a the most common type of spirit - pain fiends. Every sentient creature feels pain, so a novice might think they would be easy to identify. But ask a healer how many types of pain exist, how many words they can think of for the agonies that their patients go through, and you get an idea of the variation there must be in these pain fiends. Couple that with the fact that pain can be more than just physical - grief can cut just as badly a sword, for example. Multiply this by the the knowledge that a single pain fiend could be feeding on the emotion of hundreds, if not thousands - how will this affect its makeup? Finally, add in racial and regional variation in attitudes to pain - an orc barbarian feels the pain as joy, a dwarf woman in childbirth feels fear and elation in equal measure, and an old man rotting from within burns with frustration in one house, and sighs with relief in another. Pain alone has nearly infinite variations - Elder Osso was underestimating the task when he compared naming all spirits to naming pollen granules. Appearance A weak, young spirit doesn't look like anything apart from a bundle of amorphous energy. As a spirit grows in power it develops its sense of self, and with that it creates its body. A spirit's body can look like anything, and even spirits who develop in exactly the same circumstances may end up looking substantially different. To add to the appearance conundrum, spirits and fiends are natural shapeshifters, able to project a form of their choosing effortlessly. Again, a weak spirit will find it hard to make this shape too different from its default one - but a skilled spirit can easily appear as anything it wants to be. Unless it chooses to show you, a spirit's default form can only be seen using the spell 'true sight'. A spirit has no real control over its default form. This will usually give clues as to the spirit's identity and food source - but deciphering these clues requires a keen knowledge of local attitudes and folklore. For example, a spirit of charity in one city may appear as a nearly-spherical female figure in a yellow robe, but in another it may have formed as a huge blue cockerel with sapphires for eyes. It all depends on the emotions that formed it, and the attitude towards that emotion in the place they were formed. A spirit's default form can also evolve depending on what emotions they consume. This can happen through travel (the spirit travelling to a different town with a different attitude towards its emotion), changing attitudes (a town for whom justice used to be lynching might change over time to see justice as incarceration), or it can happen through gaining power. A powerful spirit feeds from more and more individuals, and its form changes correspondingly. Rumours, Myths and Folklore By their nature, spirits and fiends have long been the subject of widespread speculation and an entire canon of wives' tales and homespun truths have sprung up around them. For example: * 'Links to the gods -' both spirits and fiends have historically been linked to the gods, and this perception has been helped by the fact that clerics are often the only ones who can expel spirits. No solid link to the gods has ever been proved, but that doesn't stop fierce debate among clergy and commoners alike. * 'Links to ghosts -' as spirits can take their form from the emotion that formed them, this means that newly created spirits can sometimes look like dead loved ones. In addition, the methods of a spirit keen to produce fear or sadness are similar to the methods used by a ghost to gain attention - dream visions, mental messages etc. Finally, fiends are not beyond using the image of a dead loved one to provoke the emotion they need. The key difference is that a spirit has none of the memories, personality or 'amna' of a dead person - they seem familiar, but they are in fact totally alien. * 'Links to elementals - '''specifically, this stems from a belief that certain spirits have certain elemental affinities or damage types. For example, it's commonly believed that a rage fiend is associated with fire, or a justice spirit is associated with radiance. While this is plausible, and some spirits do have default forms that appear elemental, no links have ever been proven. * '''All spirits are evil -' this perception extends to warlocks. Even if the spirit is benign, warlocks are treated as pariahs at almost every major university. In some less enlightened areas, if a person is found to be a warlock they might be exiled or even executed. * 'Spirits have a true name -' a popular legend about a fiend describes a clever young halfling tricking a powerful demon by learning his true name and enslaving him with it. This myth is widespread among all of the races - but it has never been proven and has led more than one adventurer to ruin. * 'Spirits must tell the truth -' this myth likely stems from a similar one about fey. While it may be true with some fey, it is sadly completely untrue when it comes to spirits. Some will tell the truth, but others will say whatever they feel they have to in order to survive. * 'Spirits are very old -' the vast majority of spirits exist for no longer than a couple of hours. Of those who survive longer, their lifespans are usually measured in months rather than years. A spirit's best chance of living longer is to make a pact with a warlock. While not impossible in theory, there are no confirmed stories of a spirit living over 1000 years, and the number of spirits to even approach that age is in single digits. * 'There are 'arch-fiends' or 'boss-spirits' -' as a rule, spirits are fiercely independent, and will consume other spirits whenever they get the chance. This makes any sort of hierarchy impossible. Combined with the fact that very few spirits live for any length of time, this means that 'arch-fiends' just cannot exist. * '''Spirits are very wise - '''this is another myth that is really more about fey than spirits. Spirits just do not live long enough to acquire any wisdom, and they have no culture of their own. The warlock that pledges himself to a spirit hoping for the keys to arcane mysteries is going to be sorely disappointed.